Finovate Debuts: Moonraft Innovation Labs

Not a stranger to banks’ needs, Moonraft Innovation Labs spent six years in partnership with financial institutions across the globe to help them deliver an enhanced customer experience. During this time the company realized how banks struggle to keep up with the pace of customer expectations in innovation.

To begin his demo at FinovateFall 2016 in New York, Aveejeet Palit, Chief Strategy Officer explained that when banks launch a new innovation, it is often “dead on arrival” because customer expectations have already evolved. The result, Palit explains, is that the bank is always trying to catch up, needing to continually invest in the long design and development cycle.

This discovery led to the launch of Catamera, a platform that aims to help banks speed their pace of innovation to keep up with ever-evolving customer expectations. Palit described Catamera as, “a library of web components which can help you quickly put together an experience you would like… and also help you innovate and evolve at the pace your customers want.” Catamera makes it easy for banks to design and create a user experience with drag-and-drop features. Furthermore, it requires no special IT skills. The widgets library offers pre-built tools, such as PFM and a retirement planner, that connect to the banks’ back end APIs.

After the conference we caught up with Sreekumar Paramu (who goes by Sree), the company’s CEO & co-founder, Americas to discuss Catamera in more detail.

Finovate: What problem does Moonraft Innovation Labs solve?

Sree: Banks across the globe are struggling to keep pace with the speed of evolution of customer demands. Long design and development cycles mean that by the time banks are ready with a particular offering, the customer has moved on to something else. Catamera aims to address this problem by enabling banks to create amazing user experiences in a very short time, by leveraging our well designed, integration ready web components

Finovate: Who are your primary customers?

Sree: Our primary customers are small to mid sized banks & credit unions who cannot afford long design and development cycles, yet need to deliver great digital experiences to their customers. However all banks irrespective of big or small would benefit from the use of Catamera

Finovate: How does Moonraft Innovation Labs solve the problem better?

Sree: Most experience platforms are tightly coupled to heavy technology systems that increase the complexity of dealing with it. Catamera is completely decoupled from the bank’s backend technology systems, thereby drastically enhancing the speed of launch and delivery. On top of that, our comprehensive web component library and easy to use builder platform makes designing experiences very simple and intuitive.

Finovate: What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?

Sree: As an organization, Moonraft Innovation Labs has worked with more than 20 large banks globally in designing their digital banking experiences. This vast experience has exposed us to the challenges faced by banks as mentioned earlier. Our product Catamera has been born out of the insights from all these challenges in working with global banks. Also the current trend of moving towards API/Micro-service driven solutions, will make Catamera a very useful tool for innovation, for the entire banking sector.

Finovate: What are some upcoming initiatives from Moonraft Innovation Labs that we can look forward to over the next few months?

Sree: We are in the final stages of partnership with leading core banking, e-banking technology providers to partner and go to market. We are also in advanced stages of talks with multiple credit unions and small banks in the US for live deployments of the product.

Finovate: Where do you see Moonraft Innovation Labs a year or two from now?

Sree: We see Catamera leading the way for customer experience innovations for banks all over the world. Key trends that are supporting us are the API/Micro-services movement, and the urge for banks to decouple experience innovation from their core systems. In the process, we are confident of owning a significant market share, especially in the small banks and credit unions.